sfSoundSalonSeries presents ECTOPLASMIC VARIATIONS: Sam Ashley, John Krausbauer, Luciano Chessa

Three highly singular electro-acoustic musical intermediums set phasers on “other.” Strobes, trance, saws, and accordions will be deployed in the service of aesthetic emanations from aetheric realms.
SAM ASHLEY
Sam Ashley has devoted his life to the development of an experimental, non-religious mysticism, one rooted in a “find out for yourself” attitude, an attitude that he advocates in direct opposition to so many traditions. He has been a modern-day witch-doctor for almost 48 years. For more than four decades Sam has been using this mysticism in the creation of music and art.
His pieces are mostly about luck, hallucination and coincidence. Usually they include direct presentations of magic events, objects or phenomena. Sam’s performed pieces often feature the use of authentic spirit possession, something he has been working with for more than 30 years. One could say that Sam’s installation and sound art work is about finding ways to amplify imaginary sound. Almost all of what Sam does relates directly to trance.
Sam Ashley offers simple windows onto things that occur in-between the “real world” and that which transcends it.
Tales from I’D RATHER BE LUCKY THAN GOOD
A true story of Manifest Destiny, cannibalism and luck. Or just life as we know it: we (life) start out with high hopes but end up eating each other.
I SAW A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT INSECTS
This piece is about the amplification of imaginary sound. It’s a mystical experiment: it all takes place in the spirit world; I’m trusting that in a performance somewhere there’ll be a breakthrough and the audience will perceive the same paranormal things I’m perceiving in trance when I perform the piece. Maybe that’ll happen in this show…
__________________________________________
JOHN KRAUSBAUER is a music maker currently living in Los Angeles.
He has performed his music in a multitude of settings – from basements and rock clubs to colleges and art galleries. Numerous recordings of his work have been released on independent labels in both the US and Europe.
In recent years his focus has been on his solo work, involving ritual endurance happenings with voice and violin, accompanied by synth and strobes; his compositions, mainly concerned with sytems-based phasing constructions; the Ecstatic Music Band, exploring just tunings with amplified strings at high volumes and long durations, with stroboscopic lighting; The Essentialists, a country-blues-boogie-raga guitar/violin duo; and most recently the formation of the “M”inimalist psych-punk group, Night Collectors.
Trance-Psychedelia is the aim and goal.
“Beats” is a new composition-improvisation for three accordions.
Multiple pattern-variations in a closely tuned vhf range produce a dynamic field of beating patterns, difference tones, acoustic phenomena, and inner ear/auditory hallucination.
Players:
John Krausbauer – accordion
Aaron Openheim – accordion
Kate Short – accordion
________________________________
Luciano Chessa: Musical Saw, Electronics.
Luciano Chessa is among the most interesting and inventive minds currently working in the Bay Area. Active as a composer, performer, conductor and musicologist, Chessa’s work draws heavy influence from experimentation, blending unorthodox ideas with classical form. Imaginative in its embrace of the avant-garde, Chessa’s music quickly reveals the promise of the timbral and conceptual possibilities afforded by his innovative approach. Chessa’s music has featured prominently on programs across Europe, Australia and the United States. Recent premieres include Come un’infanzia, for guitar and string quartet (2011) premiered by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and A Heavenly Act(2011), an opera on libretto by Gertrude Stein commissioned by SFMOMA to compliment Virgil Thomson’s 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The work premiered on August 19, 2011, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, in a staged production by the Ensemble Parallèle, conducted by Nicole Paiement and featuring video by Kalup Linzy.  Luciano Chessa attended the Conservatory of Bologna where he earned a DMA in piano and an MA in music composition. Arriving in California in 1998 Chessa continued his studies in musicology at the University of California, Davis where he earned his Ph.D. in 2004. He has lectured at St. John’s College of Oxford, UK, Columbia University, Harvard University, Sydney’s and Melbourne’s Conservatories and Universities, the Conservatory of Music in Bologna, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and EMPAC in the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He currently serves on the composition faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.